Making art specified by a computer program is nothing new but artists using Big Data and Open Data are changing its relationship to artworld production. Can such software really replace artists, and if so are art critics any safer? Jonas Lund's "The Fear Of Missing Out" (2013) and Shardcore's generative art may hold some of the answers.

"Art fabricated by an artist following a computer-generated specification is nothing new. Prior to modern 2D and 3D printing techniques, transcribing a computer generated design into paint or metal by hand was the only way to present artworks that pen plotters or CNC mills couldn't capture. But a Tamagotchi-gamer or Amazon Mechanical Turk-style human servicing of machine agency where a program dictates the conception of an artwork for a human artist to realize also has a history. The principles involved go back even further to the use of games of chance and other automatic techniques in Dada and Surrealism."